The violent eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano injected an unprecedented amount of water directly into the stratosphere, and the steam will linger for years, likely affecting Earth’s climate patterns, scientists say NASA.
The mass amount of water vapor is about 10% of the normal amount of water vapor found in the stratosphere, equivalent to more than 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said atmospheric scientist Luis Millán, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Millán directed a study of the water that the volcano sent to the sky; the team’s research was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The volcano sent steam and gases to a record height
The January 15 eruption came from a volcano more than 12 miles wide, with a caldera located about 500 feet below sea level. A day earlier, Tongan officials reported that the volcano was in continuous eruption, sending a 3-mile-wide plume of steam and ash into the sky. Then came the big explosion, sending ash, gas and steam up to 35 miles (a record in the satellite age) into the atmosphere.
Drone footage and other videos from that day show the dramatic scale of the explosion, as the volcano threw an incredibly wide plume into the sky. The intense eruption sent a pressure wave around the Earth and caused a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska.
The large amount of water will likely cause temperatures to rise
Previous large volcanic eruptions have affected the climate, but they tend to cool temperatures, because they send light-scattering aerosols into the stratosphere. These aerosols act as a kind of massive layer of sun protection. But because water vapor traps heat, the Tonga eruption could temporarily raise temperatures a bit, the researchers said.
Typically, sulfate aerosols from volcanoes take about 2-3 years to fall out of the stratosphere. But the water from the January 15 eruption could take 5 to 10 years to fully dissipate.
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Given this time period and the extraordinary amount of water involved, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai “may be the first observed volcanic eruption to affect climate not through surface cooling caused by volcanic sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface heating,” the researchers said in their paper.
NASA says the data for the study came from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument on its Aura satellite, which measures water vapor, ozone, aerosols and gases in Earth’s atmosphere .
The volcano interrupted the “heartbeat” of water in the stratosphere
The January 15 eruption dramatically altered the annual patterns of water in the stratosphere (which also contains most of the ozone in the atmosphere).
The normal mechanism by which water rises into the stratosphere is so reliable that researchers refer to it as a kind of tape recorder, marking annual temperature cycles by alternating bands of dry and moist air rising from the tropics.
January is normally the middle of the dry period in this seasonal cycle, but then the Tonga volcano erupted in the South Pacific Ocean, suddenly injecting a large amount of water into the atmosphere.
“By short-circuiting the path through the cold point, [Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai] has disrupted this “heartbeat” signal in the planet’s normal atmospheric water pattern, the researchers said.
They recommend closely monitoring the water from the volcanic eruption, both to predict its short-term impact and to better understand how future eruptions might affect the planet’s climate.